Rants

I've been on LinkedIn for a while now, and nothing good has ever come out of it. I either get requests to connect with people that i never even met or heard about, or i get harassed by recruiters. These recruiters would call me at my employer's office to discuss ways in which i can "better myself" and when i tell them that it's not a good time to talk (as if there ever is when you're not interested), they ask me if i can send them my email address. Now, i don't want to be an arrogant prick here, but my email address is only a google search away. Why on earth would i even consider talking with a recruiter who hasn't even gone through the trouble of googling me?

As for the people who are requesting me to connect with them even though they never met or worked with me... what is that all about? Except for two or three mistakenly added 'connections' there isn't a single person in my LinkedIn connections list that i didn't either work with previously or know in person. I'm not into the whole 'networking for the purpose of networking' thing. I've done pretty well without it so far, and i'll continue to do fine without it, thank you very much.

I'm also really tired of the hypocrisy that's going on LinkedIn. I often see former co-workers publishing updates about how they're reading about DDD, TDD, Scrum, and agile development practices in general when i know all too well that they don't really care about these things and they're just jumping on the bandwagon. I've also had it with the whole recommendation thing that's going on there... i have quite a few 'connections' on there with people that i've worked with in the past but that i honestly wouldn't recommend to anyone. When you see them hooking up at a certain new employer or project or whatever, and then see them writing recommendations for each other that are just plain dishonest then you can't help but wonder what value the whole recommendation feature of LinkedIn brings in general. Seriously, 3 of the worst people i could ever imagine working with once recommended each other with raving reviews. Wanna go out of business? Hire these 3 people. They'll get along great since they seem to think the world of each other. It wouldn't exactly be a smart business decision though.

That's the biggest problem with something like LinkedIn. People get to pretend that they're important or really good while in reality, most of them aren't. It's full of phonies, who are more than willing to help the other phonies out. So what exactly, is the benefit of being on LinkedIn? Figuring out who knows who? That doesn't mean anything either since a lot of the people on it are adding connections whenever they can, whether they liked working with you or not. The whole thing is basically meaningless. And if you're good at what you do, you really don't need LinkedIn to help you out.

So i tried to delete my account... except that i couldn't. You can hide your account and make it unavailable by selecting the 'None' option in your public profile options (which i did just now), but you can't actually delete it. You have to mail their customer service to actually get them to remove your account. Pretty sad, if you ask me.

How about you? Are you on LinkedIn? Have you ever experienced any benefit whatsoever because of it?

We're currently using our own custom little IOC container in Silverlight, mainly because Castle Windsor isn't supported yet. One of the features that our IOC container has (and is based on a feature supported by Castle Windsor) is that of 'automanual dependency injection', which basically enables you to resolve a component through the container, while overriding one of the dependencies with a parameter to the container's Resolve method. This is a feature that we need, and switching to a container that doesn't have it would break a very large number of classes (basically all of our controllers) in our Silverlight applications.

Today, i figured i could replace our custom IOC container (who wants to have a custom IOC container in his codebase anyway?) with Microsoft's Unity container, which is supported on Silverlight. Turns out that there is no way to resolve a component through Unity while overriding one of the constructor dependencies of that component. Bummer.

But wait, Unity is open source, right? So i go over to Codeplex and browse the list of recent check-ins of the source control repository. The last release of this project was on October 28, 2008. It's most recent check-ins are dated July 13th, April 20th and December 1st. With such sporadic check-ins (which are more like periodic synchronizations from Microsoft's internal source code repository) there's no reason to even begin working on a patch because who knows when you'll get a code drop that officially has the patch.

That is, if the project even accepted patches. There were 3 patches submitted, and all 3 of them were declined with an "This project does not accept public code contributions" message.

So let's see... i can request a feature, but there's no guarantee that it will be implemented. Even if it were implemented, i'd have no way of using it until they decide to bless us with another code drop. I also have no way of providing the feature myself and contributing it to the project, unless i keep it privately and keep maintaining it for every new version they release.

I don't care what license they put on it, but you really can't call this Open Source development.

I have one post where i describe a workaround for a certain problem that you might encounter while working with Team City. For the past 2 weeks or so, someone who happened to read that post suddenly got it in his head that he can come to me for all of his Team City questions.

The problem he's having doesn't even have anything to do with the content of the post, yet he keeps asking questions about something that appears to be rather specific to ClearCase (which i haven't used in over 5 years, nor do i have access to the product). It's pretty clear from his first comment that he doesn't even read the information in front of him, so i figured i'd just redirect him to the manuals of the products he's using and not waste any time on it. After all, i do not work on Team City, nor ClearCase and the problem he wanted me to help him with is not something i intend to figure out. I hardly have enough time to spend on everything i want to spend time on, so i'm not just going to try and help everyone with whatever problem they come up with. If i can quickly help you, i definitely will. If it takes me time to help you, i might do it if i actually have that time. But there is no guarantee that i'm going to help you, especially not if you've clearly demonstrated your lack of ability or intent to pursue a solution on your own.

I've deleted any subsequent comments from him asking for Team City assistance. I really don't like that because i have somewhat of a policy of only deleting comments that weren't caught by the spam filter but anything else i never delete. But his comments are just questions from someone who expects me to help him figure out a problem that i really can't help him with. In my first reply, i mentioned that i hardly know anything about ClearCase and that i simply didn't know how he could fix his problem. His subsequent comments kinda annoyed me, but what really pissed me off is a comment that he probably got one of his coworkers (since the IP resolved to the same company) to post, also asking for help with the ClearCase issue he was running into.

So here's a hint: if i've stated that i can't help you, and that i'm deleting your subsequent comments for assistance, then please, seek help elsewhere already. Do not persist, and please don't ask your coworkers to ask me the same question either. If you want help, please exhibit at least some kind of willingness to look into a problem on your own!

Most of us are working in object-oriented environments, right? How many of us are working in a truly object-oriented manner? How many of us merely think that we're working in an object-oriented manner?

I just happened to read the following (who it's from or where i read it doesn't really matter):

When i was learning OOP back in the early 1980s, ...

A statement like that just makes me cringe. Here we are, in the year 2009 and we're all trying to continuously get better at our craft, our hobby, our passion, or maybe just our job. An increasingly larger number of .NET developers are basing their improvement on solid OO principles and practices. And i don't just mean Uncle Bob's SOLID principles. I'm talking about learning from the experience which others before us have gained 20, 30 years ago. How sad is that? I mean, learning from others is great, but how sad is it that all of this great knowledge is something that only a portion of us seek to learn, and usually only after having been active in this profession for a while.

This is an industry where we are supposed to advance rapidly in our way of working, to achieve better results. To produce higher quality software at a lower cost, ideally striking a balance between short-term cost and long-term cost. Yet we are still having difficulty trying to get the majority of us to accept and embrace what others have learned many, many years ago. Oh sure, we might have achieved a higher level of automation within our development process these days due to the availability of more advanced frameworks and tools. But take a look at the principles that are behind most of these frameworks and tools... Most of them have been around for a long time and it's a pretty sad state of affairs that these kinds of principles are only starting to become popular in the year 2009.

Personally, i would put most of the blame with the large software vendors. They continuously hop on whatever bandwagon is popular at the time, while always promising increased productivity with their latest products. You can create a web application just like that (snaps fingers). Want some AJAX goodness? Oh just drag this component on to your web page and voila, you're done! Need Web Services? Just put some of these attributes on top of your methods and there you go! Or better yet, let's just all design some models and generate a whole bunch of code which will save us a tremendous amount of money!

So far, that hasn't really worked out, has it? Yes, most of these 'innovations' increase short-term productivity and best of all, they don't require expensive training and education. Everybody wins! In the longer term, this usually leads to software which is just waiting to be killed off and rewritten and developers who are even more fucked up than they already were.

This has some pretty interesting non-technical consequences as well. What is the general perception of normal people when it comes to the average quality of software that they experience on a day-to-day basis? A lot of people not only accept the fact that software is often buggy or unreliable, they've even come to expect it! Software that crashes? Oh that's ok, just restart it. Weird error messages? Oh that's ok, just click on them and they go away. Is it slow? Well everything is slow these days! I've often wondered exactly how we ended up with this culture of accepted and expected mediocrity. At least there is one benefit: if you're not a complete idiot, you've got a pretty good shot at a successful career in this field.

We're always looking ahead for newer versions of whatever it is that we use, newer tools, approaches that avoid problems that we're currently facing, the silver bullet that is going to solve all of our problems, etc... And that is important, we need continuous progress. It just would be nice if people realized that in order to truly create progress, you need to keep learning from the past as well.